How to Make Your Intranet a Value-Add for HR

Internal Communications and HR / People Operations teams are like Mac & Cheese, PB & J, or Sam and Frodo—they’re great on their own, but better together.

In most organizations, there’s already a lot of organic collaboration and cross-pollination that goes on between Internal Comms and People Ops. Even if that’s true in your organization, there are probably still a lot of ways you could strengthen your strategic partnership further.

We’re going to focus on the company intranet as a scaffolding to support this collaboration.

Most of the tips below will apply no matter what stage you’re at in your intranet journey. If you don’t have an intranet, or if your current intranet isn’t capable of some of the things we cover here, don’t worry. We can help you out with that.

Step Zero: Get Everyone Aligned and Involved

Assumptions can complicate, or even sour a good working relationship. So throw them out like those month-old takeout leftovers hiding behind the yogurt in the back of the fridge.

Whether you’re looking for a new intranet, revamping your current one, or planning to build one, it’s important to have your key stakeholders involved early on. This will help ensure it provides maximum value.

People Ops will not only be one of your most important advocates during the search and implementation phases, they’ll also be some of your most important post-implementation power users.

So, start by getting together and confirming the People Ops team’s top priorities and goals. Whatever they are, there’s a good chance an intranet can play an impactful role. Speaking of impact, let’s kick this list off with a high-leverage area that most organizations struggle with: employee onboarding.

Streamline Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding has never been easy. Anyone who tells you it is easy probably doesn’t do it well, or isn’t responsible for it. Over the past few years, the challenge of onboarding new employees hasn’t reduced; instead it’s compounded in some new and unexpected ways.

Predominantly in-office teams had to figure out how to onboard remote or hybrid employees effectively. The digital employee experience became paramount in industries where it barely existed a few years ago. Organizations have had to adapt more quickly and frequently than ever, and onboarding practices have had to follow suit.

How can an intranet add value for HR here?

• Craft a dedicated experience for new hires that introduces them to essential information, people, policies, and resources.
• Give new employees an easy way to confirm they’ve read and acknowledged important company news or policies.
• Build connections by introducing new hires to mentors, colleagues with common interests, or other new hires in the same cohort.
• Measure onboarding effectiveness through content engagement analytics.
• Showcase new hires to the broader team.

If you’re a Haystack customer and would like to bring any of these experiences to your workspace, check in with your CSM!

Centralize Employee Information

Even in the best-organized teams, disparate bits of people data often end up stored across multiple platforms. With integrations and a centralizing structure, modern intranets can be the perfect place to consolidate that information under one roof.

How can an intranet add value for HR here?

• Securely integrating with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) and other tools that house important information.
• Bringing all this employee information into one place makes it easy to see reporting relationships, achievements, contact information, and more at a glance.
• When performance evaluation season comes around, having an easily accessible record of shoutouts and important initiatives employees participated in can help curb unconscious managerial biases. For example, recency bias can be reduced by presenting a more complete and objective picture of an employee’s contributions to the team to managers during reviews.
• An intranet with a good employee directory can make it effortless to find and communicate with anyone in the organization, in one seamless motion.

Organize, Share, and Govern Knowledge

People Ops and HR teams have a lot of important information they need to share with everyone. This complicated corpus of information isn’t easy to keep track of and keep updated without some kind of formalized system.

That’s a key area where your intranet can be a massive boon for your friends in HR.

Provide a Source of Truth

It’s surprisingly common for employees to have a hard time finding an important document, or information on a company policy—and sometimes, even if they do find it, it’s not the right version, or it’s out of date. A well-organized company knowledge base can alleviate this friction by providing a single, reliable, and easily searchable source of truth for employees.

Simplify and Support Governance

Modern intranets can also make governance painless. For example, Haystack’s Freshness engine allows users to set expiration dates for important documents that need to be updated regularly like employee handbooks, policies, or info about benefits packages.  Flexible publishing permissions can help ensure compliance and information accuracy.

Confirm and Acknowledge

Making knowledge accessible is crucial for People Ops teams, but some organizational knowledge is so critical that simply providing access to it isn’t enough—it needs to be actively acknowledged. Once again, intranets can play an essential role in tracking compliance by requiring employees to acknowledge receipt of important information and sending reminders to those who don’t.

Keep Sensitive Communications Internal

Other organizational knowledge is sensitive and proprietary, but still needs to be shared with employees. Intranets with secure sharing capabilities (like Haystack’s Secure Delivery) can provide some major benefits by empowering the organization to embrace transparency with confidence.

Facilitate Employee Self-Service

Answering the same questions over and over again isn’t a good use of anyone’s time. If this becomes a frequent enough pattern, it can be downright demoralizing. This experience is something most People Ops teams are deeply familiar with, because they’re often the ones fielding those repeat questions.

And here’s the thing: Nobody likes this.

Employees don’t want to have to ask these questions directly and wait for responses, either. They just need a quick, succinct, and reliable answer. Reducing reliance on one-off questions not only saves time for the People Ops team, it saves employees time and mental bandwidth, too.

A modern intranet with integrated search can make finding the right people, information, or resources easy, even if they’re scattered across different platforms.

Foster Employee Engagement

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a People Operations team that doesn’t care about employee engagement, and modern intranets are one of the most powerful tools imaginable for fostering it.

An intranet is the perfect place to share company news, manage and promote company events, and support initiatives that reinforce organizational culture and values. It’s also a place for employees to connect, collaborate, share ideas, and actively participate in a way that helps strengthen the connection between their own goals and your organization’s.

Recognition is another core aspect of employee engagement, and an intranet provides numerous mechanisms for celebrating the people that drive your organization’s success.

Some, like birthday or work anniversary celebrations, can be passive and automated. Shoutouts and badges are an engaging and active way to empower employees to give and receive recognition for the contributions they value most.

Intranets are also a great way to create a sense of belonging for all employees. From employee resource groups (ERGs) to clubs and affinity groups, and language translation, a good modern intranet should provide an inviting, inclusive space for everyone in your organization.

If you’re a Haystack customer working to foster employee engagement in your organization, check in with your CSM for a strategy session!

Measure Success

Last, but not least, is measurement. To paraphrase an old adage: if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Your intranet can help the People Ops team measure the success of their initiatives in a way that would be difficult or impossible otherwise.

• Measuring engagement and viewership on major announcements
• Tracking company policy acknowledgement
• Posting polls to gauge employee sentiment
• Tracking key resource engagement

Bringing it Home

HR and People Operations are key stakeholders for any intranet, and if you’re able to align with their goals and objectives, they’ll also be some of its strongest advocates early on and into the future.

These are just a few examples of ways an intranet can provide a major value-add for HR and People Operations teams. The tip of the iceberg, so to speak. You’re likely to discover many more—some of which may be unique to your organization—by connecting with your colleagues.

For more inspiration on ways HR and People Operations can team up with Internal Communications to deliver an outstanding digital employee experience, check out our customer stories. A few great examples to start with are NerdWallet and OpenStore.